Beware Prop 16

Word about Prop 16, which will appear on the June ballot, is beginning to get out.

The measure would amend the state constitution — which requires just a 50 percent vote plus one — to require municipalities to garner a two-thirds vote in order to replace their private utility service with a public one, like Marin County recently did.

San Francisco adopted a compromise “community choice aggregation” plan in 2007. The plan isn’t public power, but it would allow consumers to obtain 50 percent renewable energy through the PG&E grid unless they opt out. PG&E — which is failing to meet even its minimal state-mandated renewable energy targets — is expected to lobby its rate-payers to opt out, making the unproven claim that the plan, called CleanPowerSF, would result in higher bills. State law requires utilities to “cooperate fully” with such programs.

In 2009, city voters rejected Prop H, which would have moved the city toward public power. PG&E spent $10 million campaigning against that measure. The utility has also threatened to refuse to deliver power to Marin’s public utility, explicitly in violation of state law.

But Prop 16 isn’t just another battle in PG&E’s war on clean energy; it’s also an example of everything that’s wrong with the balloting system in California: Company buys its way to the ballot with a measure that would specifically diminish voters’ already limited influence over the company. That it will take a constitutional amendment to do so is just the putrid icing on the cake.

Former assemblywoman Carole Migden, who wrote the state bill empowering cities to adopt community choice aggregation, will join long-time clean-power advocate John Rizzo of the Sierra Club, as well as Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos, at a public meeting on Prop 16 tomorrow, March 2nd, at 6:45 pm at the LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market St., at Octavia).